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Q&A: Current TV's Joel Hyatt
Current TV’s CEO says the cable channel is moving past its chairman’s high profile and could achieve profitability by next year.
August 18, 2005
A youth-geared “Al Gore cable channel” sounds about as hip as a politician lip-synching the latest 50 Cent single.
It’s an image that Current TV, Mr. Gore’s cable channel that launched on August 1, will have to bear as long as its chairman is the former vice president of the United States.
But after early positive reviews, Current’s CEO Joel Hyatt said the cable channel for the youth of America is starting to move beyond its perception as just “Gore TV.”
“This is not about Al Gore, this is about the people who are creating the content,” said Mr. Hyatt in the channel’s San Francisco office.
The channel boasts that 25 percent of its content is viewer-generated in the form of three- to 10-minute clips. Mr. Hyatt calls the site truly democratic, quickly adding, “with a small ‘d’ of course.” He claims the site will not have a political slant.
Mr. Hyatt said even in its current beta stage the channel is doing so well that profitability is in the realm of possibility sometime next year.
‘We would like to be the first good example of the new business model.’
-Joel Hyatt,
Current TV
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It’s a difficult feat for any channel, but especially one with two outsiders like Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt steering the company through the television industry. Mr. Hyatt is the founder of Hyatt Legal Services and was national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Mr. Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.
He sat down with Red Herring to explain his outsider advantage and why there’s no real money to be made with the current state of Internet TV.
If Current TV wants to be so participatory, why go with the cable industry at all? Why not just go straight to the Internet as a distribution model?
There are two reasons. One is technological and the other is economic. For over a decade, people have talked about how television will end up on the Internet, but the impediments remain today as much as they have over the last decade.
The technology isn’t there for full-motion video to mass-distribute to millions of people. There is also no business model today. There are lots of people putting content out on the Internet, but it is not clear how you can do that in an economically sustainable way.
Television networks don’t stream their programming on the Internet, and while some of that is technical, some of it comes from the fact that the cable and satellite operators who distribute the content prohibit it. They don’t want to pay Current for content and then have Current put it out for free as well.
But our goal is not to be the last good example of the old business model. We would like to be the first good example of the new business model. We believe our content will be far more attractive to be distributed on new platforms like the Internet or cell phones.
I don’t see people watching a two-hour movie on their cell phones, but they might watch one of our two-minute Google Current features. We are developing content which we think will be leading-edge on other distribution methods.
Though the early reviews have been pretty positive, an 18-to-34-year-old Al Gore Channel doesn’t exactly sound like a big hit.
The “Al Gore thing” kind of misses the point, and I think that people are starting to realize that. People focused on the fact that we were outside the industry and, yeah, that brought a lot of positives and some negatives.
The good news is that people are past that point. The proof is in the pudding. We launched a network and people will watch it.
Al and I bring a lot of advantages as non-television people. I’m not sure television people would have seen the wisdom of how to structure a programming slate with benefit to the target audience or benefit for future distribution to other platforms.
There is a benefit of being an outsider. Not only are there no legacy systems and a clean slate, but there is also no legacy thinking.
A quarter of viewer-submitted content is not really that much for a “participatory” channel.
Actually when we were at the drawing board we assumed that we would launch with 100 percent of the content created by us, and our world-class team of directors and editors. We thought aspirationally that we’d add consumer-created content where we could.
Then we started to get incredible submissions from people and we started to think 10 percent of our content would be submitted. When we launched, the 25 percent was actually way in excess of our expectations.
Right now Current TV is shown in 20 million households. Fifty million is usually cited as a break-even point. How do you plan to raise the amount of viewers?
We think it will be very hard for cable companies not to carry us given the support we are getting from people in communities who want access to a network that is about what is going on in their lives, with their voices.
We think it is such compelling offering that if you are a cable company somewhere that is not carrying it, we think the demand by consumers will be that that won’t last very long.
When do you expect the channel to be profitable?
We are not profitable now, but we are way ahead of plans. We have gotten to this point with far less operating loss this year and far less capital than was in our business model. So we are way ahead. We can’t predict with certainty, but it is in the realm of possibility next year.
Now that the site has been live since August 1, has there been anything the company has learned that Current wants to change, such as the frequency at which the segments are repeated throughout the day?
Oh sure. Again this will forever be an evolution. That’s the point of the participatory process. We are so new and we are still adding the early design features every day.
Just in the last week or so, we put our online studio up, where you can go in and review videos that have been submitted and vote for those that should be on the air.
Over the coming months we will put up a free training program for anyone who wants to come in and develop or improve their skills. It’s like an online university for citizen journalists. We created the curriculum with some of the leading journalism schools and with some celebrities who will produce some of the content.
We knew when we launched in August that we were launching with too high of a repeat factor, but I expected a lot more systems headaches and engineering snafus. Yes, there are improvements to be made, but we are off to a good start.
Current TV’s CEO says the cable channel is moving past its chairman’s high profile and could achieve profitability by next year.
August 18, 2005
A youth-geared “Al Gore cable channel” sounds about as hip as a politician lip-synching the latest 50 Cent single.
It’s an image that Current TV, Mr. Gore’s cable channel that launched on August 1, will have to bear as long as its chairman is the former vice president of the United States.
But after early positive reviews, Current’s CEO Joel Hyatt said the cable channel for the youth of America is starting to move beyond its perception as just “Gore TV.”
“This is not about Al Gore, this is about the people who are creating the content,” said Mr. Hyatt in the channel’s San Francisco office.
The channel boasts that 25 percent of its content is viewer-generated in the form of three- to 10-minute clips. Mr. Hyatt calls the site truly democratic, quickly adding, “with a small ‘d’ of course.” He claims the site will not have a political slant.
Mr. Hyatt said even in its current beta stage the channel is doing so well that profitability is in the realm of possibility sometime next year.
‘We would like to be the first good example of the new business model.’
-Joel Hyatt,
Current TV
- ADVERTISEMENT -
It’s a difficult feat for any channel, but especially one with two outsiders like Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt steering the company through the television industry. Mr. Hyatt is the founder of Hyatt Legal Services and was national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Mr. Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.
He sat down with Red Herring to explain his outsider advantage and why there’s no real money to be made with the current state of Internet TV.
If Current TV wants to be so participatory, why go with the cable industry at all? Why not just go straight to the Internet as a distribution model?
There are two reasons. One is technological and the other is economic. For over a decade, people have talked about how television will end up on the Internet, but the impediments remain today as much as they have over the last decade.
The technology isn’t there for full-motion video to mass-distribute to millions of people. There is also no business model today. There are lots of people putting content out on the Internet, but it is not clear how you can do that in an economically sustainable way.
Television networks don’t stream their programming on the Internet, and while some of that is technical, some of it comes from the fact that the cable and satellite operators who distribute the content prohibit it. They don’t want to pay Current for content and then have Current put it out for free as well.
But our goal is not to be the last good example of the old business model. We would like to be the first good example of the new business model. We believe our content will be far more attractive to be distributed on new platforms like the Internet or cell phones.
I don’t see people watching a two-hour movie on their cell phones, but they might watch one of our two-minute Google Current features. We are developing content which we think will be leading-edge on other distribution methods.
Though the early reviews have been pretty positive, an 18-to-34-year-old Al Gore Channel doesn’t exactly sound like a big hit.
The “Al Gore thing” kind of misses the point, and I think that people are starting to realize that. People focused on the fact that we were outside the industry and, yeah, that brought a lot of positives and some negatives.
The good news is that people are past that point. The proof is in the pudding. We launched a network and people will watch it.
Al and I bring a lot of advantages as non-television people. I’m not sure television people would have seen the wisdom of how to structure a programming slate with benefit to the target audience or benefit for future distribution to other platforms.
There is a benefit of being an outsider. Not only are there no legacy systems and a clean slate, but there is also no legacy thinking.
A quarter of viewer-submitted content is not really that much for a “participatory” channel.
Actually when we were at the drawing board we assumed that we would launch with 100 percent of the content created by us, and our world-class team of directors and editors. We thought aspirationally that we’d add consumer-created content where we could.
Then we started to get incredible submissions from people and we started to think 10 percent of our content would be submitted. When we launched, the 25 percent was actually way in excess of our expectations.
Right now Current TV is shown in 20 million households. Fifty million is usually cited as a break-even point. How do you plan to raise the amount of viewers?
We think it will be very hard for cable companies not to carry us given the support we are getting from people in communities who want access to a network that is about what is going on in their lives, with their voices.
We think it is such compelling offering that if you are a cable company somewhere that is not carrying it, we think the demand by consumers will be that that won’t last very long.
When do you expect the channel to be profitable?
We are not profitable now, but we are way ahead of plans. We have gotten to this point with far less operating loss this year and far less capital than was in our business model. So we are way ahead. We can’t predict with certainty, but it is in the realm of possibility next year.
Now that the site has been live since August 1, has there been anything the company has learned that Current wants to change, such as the frequency at which the segments are repeated throughout the day?
Oh sure. Again this will forever be an evolution. That’s the point of the participatory process. We are so new and we are still adding the early design features every day.
Just in the last week or so, we put our online studio up, where you can go in and review videos that have been submitted and vote for those that should be on the air.
Over the coming months we will put up a free training program for anyone who wants to come in and develop or improve their skills. It’s like an online university for citizen journalists. We created the curriculum with some of the leading journalism schools and with some celebrities who will produce some of the content.
We knew when we launched in August that we were launching with too high of a repeat factor, but I expected a lot more systems headaches and engineering snafus. Yes, there are improvements to be made, but we are off to a good start.
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